A Curious Career (8 page)

I must confess I found my sudden entry into the huggy bosom of the
Doc Martin
‘community’ a tad bewildering, but even more so was the fact that my old friends, who had been so snooty before, simultaneously started saying they were now converts to
Doc Martin
. Why? ‘Because Eileen Atkins is so wonderful in it.’ Oh tsk, of all the reasons for watching
Doc Martin
, this is the most egregious! Atkins arrived at the start of the fifth series, when the scriptwriters killed off the doctor’s aunt Joan (Stephanie Cole) who I must say was a dreadful bore, and brought in a different, more spiky and intelligent, aunt to inherit her house. The arrival of a posh thespian like Eileen Atkins apparently means it’s now acceptable to talk about
Doc Martin
at dinner parties.

But of course what makes
Doc Martin
wonderful (apart from the brilliant script, the gorgeous Cornish setting, and all the exciting diseases we’ll get on to later) is Martin Clunes as the doctor. I always assumed when he was Gary in
Men Behaving Badly
that he was just playing himself, but I realise from
Doc Martin
that he’s one of the finest, subtlest television actors around.
Doc Martin
is the complete opposite of Gary – uptight, unsmiling, abrasive, brutally rude to his patients and unfailingly rough with children.

So anyway, this was a happy prospect, going to interview an actor I genuinely admire, and to talk about my favourite television show. And it all started so well. His house, surrounded by horses and lambs, is on a beautiful Dorset hillside with views right down to the Jurassic Coast. While Clunes poses for photographs, his wife Philippa Braithwaite, who produces
Doc Martin
, makes me coffee in the Smeg-filled kitchen and lets me admire all the family photographs – Martin, Philippa and daughter Emily, twelve – and portraits of their many dogs and horses.

So far, so good, and even better when Martin Clunes appears, in a great whoosh of dogs, and ushers me through to the sitting room to talk. He is smiling, laughing, jovial, friendly. Everyone – even my colleague Camilla Long – has told me I will love him. He raves on about a visit he and Philippa have just made to the Army Saddle Club in Cyprus, in his capacity as President of the British Horse Society, and what fun it was meeting Army families and talking horse. He points proudly through the window to his enormous steed Chester, and says they have another fourteen horses and some miniature Shetland ponies in the paddocks. He gets up at 6.30 to feed them all, and has spent the morning moving lambs up the hill. He calls himself ‘a luvvie farmer’ but he obviously takes his farming seriously.

This bucolic chat is all very well, but I am dying to talk about
Doc Martin
. Unfortunately, Martin Clunes doesn’t seem to be. He says he wants more roles, different roles, he wants to do more acting. ‘Of course
Doc Martin
is acting, but it’s a particular kind of job because it’s our own company [Buffalo Pictures] that makes it, so it’s just very different from a normal actor’s life.’ He found a few years ago that he was no longer being offered parts, which is why he made TV documentaries (produced by Philippa) about dogs and horses and islands. But his first love is still acting. ‘I really want to get back to acting. I went up for a job last week – I didn’t get it. But I thought: Great! This is what I signed up for, you know. To actually go up for a part and they say choose some scenes to read, I really found it refreshing. I’m kind of sad that I don’t do it any more.’

But this is so disloyal to
Doc Martin
! Could he seriously contemplate doing a different television series? ‘Why not? I’m self-employed. Yes. I just want to do something else as well, that’s why I’m going to all these auditions. I want to go back to supporting and not having the whole thing on my shoulders, playing the title role. Because I’m basically a character actor who got lucky, you know. And I’m sort of preparing for the twilight of my career. I’m fifty and there’s no guarantee, no pension. And if you’re self-employed, you always worry about that.’ But he can’t seriously worry about money – his farm must be worth a fortune. ‘Yes indeed – that’s where all the money went! But I just need to do what I do. I only realised this year that I really miss acting.’

Dearohdearohdearohdear. Luckily he has signed up for one more series of
Doc Martin
, the sixth, but he insists that will be the last. Sob. ‘It would just be such a contortion to carry on. It would get repetitive, it would become a soap. And we can’t keep the will-they-won’t-they thing going with Louisa now they’re together. They have to co-exist – though at what level of functionality, I don’t know.’

Another problem is that they must sooner or later run out of diseases. The inhabitants of Portwenn have suffered from every obscure ailment known to medicine. They develop arsenic poisoning from their wallpaper; they grow breasts from ingesting their wife’s HRT cream, or break their legs from taking too many calcium supplements. And they frequently ‘go Bodmin’ from, say, cleaning their floors with weedkiller the way they do. (The Mayor of Bodmin objected to the use of ‘gone Bodmin’ in the script but actually it’s widespread in Cornwall because Bodmin used to have the county’s biggest mental hospital.) The very first time Doc Martin saw Louisa he looked deep into her eyes – and told her she had glaucoma. But glaucoma is a very minor ailment by Portwenn standards.

The diseases are supplied by Dr Martin Scurr who acts as medical adviser. He was enlisted right at the beginning by scriptwriter Dominic Minghella (brother of the late Anthony) who asked him to suggest some rare diseases to show off Doc Martin’s skill as a diagnostician, and he came up with the man who grew breasts in the very first episode. Scurr takes his job very seriously and rides down to Port Isaac on his motorbike any time Doc Martin has to undertake a new procedure. ‘First time I defribbed,’ Clunes recalls, ‘first time I delivered a baby, he was there.’ Scurr gets furious when screen medics do things wrong – examining a patient from the left-hand side of the bed instead of the right, or ‘that terrible ear examination in
We Need to Talk about Kevin
’.
Doc Martin
generally gets high marks from the medical profession (unlike
House
) and some of the episodes have been used as teaching aids, but there was a bit of flak in the last series when Eileen Atkins told Doc Martin that she was dying of lupus. Doc Martin examined her and said no she didn’t have lupus, she had Sjogren’s syndrome – but he failed to correct the idea that lupus was necessarily fatal.

Martin Clunes has often said that the reason he likes playing Doc Martin is because he finds it exhilarating to be so rude – ‘It’s my liberation from having to be nice to people.’ He claims he is by nature emollient and eager to please. Nevertheless I sense an underlying irritability and he admits that he can have a temper if annoyed. But rather than shout at people, he withdraws. ‘Nowadays I think: Oh I don’t have to put up with that, and I’ll just extricate myself from the situation. Whereas I used to put up with it silently.’

His father, the actor Alec Clunes, always seemed a rather tortured soul and had a reputation for not suffering fools gladly. Martin says he didn’t really know his father because he died when he was eight but, ‘I keep finding things out about him as I get older. Yes, I think he probably was quite tortured. I think he gave a lot of people quite a hard time. He was a bit of a prick actually. I don’t think he was very nice to my mum.’ Martin only found out years later that his father had actually abandoned the family and gone to live in Majorca, but returned a few months later when he was diagnosed with lung cancer.

Nevertheless his mother always claimed that he was a wonderful husband and father. ‘Because SHE worshipped him. She was very stage-struck, till her dying day [she died four years ago], and she used to work for him at the Arts Theatre and he was a very serious classical actor. And she would talk about actors and say oh so and so was wonderful in such and such. And I’d say but he was a complete bastard who hit his wife and she would say I know, but he was a marvellous Hamlet! That would sort of let actors off. If they’d given a good Iago, they could have raped the dog.’

His mother was happy when Martin, after a wretched time at boarding school, joined the Arts Educational stage school, and soon started getting theatre and television parts. The longest he was ever out of work was eight months and that was before the huge success of
Men Behaving Badly
. But would she have preferred him to be a classical actor like his father? ‘No, because I think she was a realist and she could see that I could make a living. And I did
Tartuffe
at the National. She was pleased as punch about that.’ But actually HE didn’t much enjoy working at the National – he complained afterwards that there was a ‘meanness of spirit’ about the place – they made him pay to use the car park and didn’t even give him a farewell drinks party. And he finds theatre work quite limiting generally. ‘You only see other actors, never really mix with the other trades, and the whole day is taken up with looking at your watch.’ And he wouldn’t do a theatre run at present because ‘My daughter’s still at home and I don’t want to piss that away really.’

He seems very much a settled family man now, but he had quite a wild youth. He says it wasn’t THAT wild: ‘I went through it all at the appropriate age but not to the degree that people make out. And by the time we made
Men Behaving Badly
it wasn’t the appropriate age. That was the joke – that we were too old to be behaving badly. And we were a really hard-working, professional group. That’s not to say I never went to a pub with Neil Morrissey, but I wasn’t Oliver Reed!’ So he didn’t have to go into rehab or anything? ‘No, because I wasn’t ever at a sort of Road to Damascus crisis point. I just grew up.’ And then he met Philippa, and had Emily, and moved to the country and ‘I felt very happy, and lucky, and that seemed to reflect on what happened to me – I got even luckier, in everything.’

TELL ME, dog-lovers: is it possible to train a dog to demolish a tape recorder? I ask, because after we’d been chatting for about an hour, and Clunes was beginning to show signs of impatience, his big black retriever Arthur stood up and very deliberately wagged his tail over my water glass knocking it on to the tape recorder, which gave a little scream and died. Clunes told me he was sure the tape recorder would recover if I put it in a bag of rice overnight but he seemed quite happy to think the interview was over. But – aha! – I had another tape recorder in my bag and ran to fetch it. However, I do feel that this is where the interview took a turn for the worse.

It started when I quoted a line from the cuttings in which he is supposed to have said that his twenties were ‘like one long stag night’. ‘I never said that,’ he snaps. ‘One of your colleagues must have made it up. The press always makes things up. I’ve got a whole catalogue of things – I’ve had thirty years of it. When there was talk of us getting back together to make another series of
Men Behaving Badly
, the
Observer
said that we were all going to get paid a quarter of a million to do it – which meant that my tax office looked at my accounts and said, “There’s a discrepancy here.” Another paper photographed my mother outside her antiques shop so that they could say “Mum behaving badly” – making her cry and cancel going to antiques fairs. And later, when her house was on the market and we knocked fifty grand off the price, the
Sunday Times
added a nought to make it half a million, so they could have the headline “Market behaving badly”. But of course when I phoned they said no, no, no, we didn’t do it deliberately, it was just a typo. That’s pretty hateful, don’t you think? Or do you think it’s OK?’ No, of course I don’t think it’s OK, I tell him, while privately thinking obviously it must have been a typo.

There is more, much more, a long catalogue of complaints against the press, going back for years. The odd thing is that if you read his cuttings, it is actually very rare to find a negative word against him. But when I suggest that he’s had a pretty good press on the whole, he says sourly, ‘Apart from them paying money to my ex-wife a couple of times.’ I suspect this is the nub. His first wife, Lucy Aston, has twice published kiss’ n’ tells, brokered, he says, by Max Clifford, describing her life with Clunes as ‘all cruelty and cocaine’. She said that he already had a cocaine habit when they married in 1990 but it got steadily worse to the point that he was snorting coke before he set out for work in the mornings. And, perhaps because of the coke, he had a ‘mercurial’ temper and shouted at her in public. Eventually Lucy booked them in for marriage guidance counselling, but Clunes skipped many of the sessions, or else refused to speak, and soon afterwards left her for Philippa Braithwaite.

As revelations by ex-wives go, the Lucy Aston story wasn’t actually in the shock-horror class though I can see it must have made unhappy reading at the time. But if, as he claims, he is always being misquoted, there is one basic precaution he could take, I tell him, which would be to have his own tape recorder on the table. ‘That would make for a nice relaxed atmosphere, wouldn’t it?’ he snorts. ‘THAT would be bitter, that would be crazily consumed by it.’ But he DOES seem bitter. ‘Do you think I’m bitter? I don’t think I’m bitter. How should I react to it? Just say oh it’s just a bit of fun?’

He is still smiling, while he carries on listing all the crimes journalists have committed – Bernard Ingham said this, Suzanne Moore said that – piling insult after insult on to my profession. There is a truly weird disjunction between his friendly manner and the words coming out of his mouth, so much so that I am genuinely confused about how to react. Eventually when I protest that these are my colleagues he’s abusing, he says, all innocent amazement, ‘But I’m just telling you what happened.’ HE seems surprised that I should object; I am surprised that anyone of any intelligence would decide to vent his hatred of journalists to a journalist. And his anger is all the more chilling for being expressed with a smile.